10 Future-Proof Gadgets You’ll Still Love Next Year

7-inch Media Tablets

If you want a low-cost, high-portability media tablet, there’s no reason at all to wait. Right now, you can buy three outstanding media tablets: the Amazon Kindle Fire HD, Google Nexus 7 or Barnes and Noble Nook HD for $199 with the slightly-large, 7.8-inch iPad Mini likely to launch in the next few weeks.

Since none of these companies refreshes their flagship products more than once a year, if you buy one now, you won’t see a new version come out until late 2013. Even at that time, they’ll be hard pressed to improve the high-res screens, speedy CPUs and long battery lives you get from these devices today. I also don’t expect prices for premium media tablets to drop much below the $199 mark, because the companies that sell them would be swallowing a huge loss.

The official Geeks Geek, as his weekly column is titled, Avram Piltch has guided the editorial and production of Laptopmag.com since 2007. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram programmed several of LAPTOP's real-world benchmarks, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. He holds a master’s degree in English from NYU.

Unless your specific piece of equipment can’t do a specific job, all you electronic gear can be “future proof”. All you have to do is keep doing what you’re doing. And as long as you can keep that up, there’s no need to get rid of any device until it actually fails. The problem is the copy and past opinion pushing bloggers that have a vested interest in the tech world.

Make no mistake about it, tech writers DO have a vested interest, they MUST push the latest gadget, and if they stop pushing and you stop buying … well, they’re out of a job. Keep that in mind the next time some IT guy tells you to be sure and get the latest update, the latest hardware or the latest whatever. He needs you to spend your money on anything, just something! That’s the only way he keeps getting paid to tell you how and when to spend your money.

What the heck are you talking about? I’m an “IT guy” and I get paid to solve problems, not push some software update on to people (which, by the by, are usually free anyhow.) Most devices used in the corporate environment have already been tested to work in that environment before being distributed.

Moot point.

Tech writers, well, you’re probably right on that one. Saying “some IT guy” just doesn’t sound like you know what you’re talking about.

Man no wonder why nobody knows about this site… it’s all crap articles. The iphone 5 is far from future proof, it was outdated right off the assembly line. Please either write good stuff or don’t even write wt all. I swear if hackers spent their time taking down sites like these, we would have such a better internet

Why is the i5 so special and not any other phone, I see ppl with 2 year old phones everyday that do everything they need them to. They’re all going to work for years and if you really want to get technical about it, the android phones are more future proof than any Apple phone. With a micro SD slot and swappable batteries you can turn your battery life into as good as new or better than new a year down the road for $10 and you can expand your memory if you need.